Social housing estates are typically neglected places, detached from modern cities’ social structures, with negative connotations that have been growing over time and that translate into general feelings of danger, fear, and exclusion by current society. Braga is a city in which this occurs in three specific social housing estates: Enguardas, Santa Tecla, and Picoto. These three estates deal with several problematic issues, rumours and prejudices that hinder the possibility of better integration of its residents in the city’s existing structures. Starting off from this premise and in an effort to combat misconceptions and discrimination present in these specific estates, the Space Transcribers collective was invited by the Braga City Council to create a social intervention project which would aim to transcribe renewed narratives of these neighbourhoods’ urban history and their communities’ lifestyles. In this regard, this publication compiles all the theoretical and practical research developed over the period of one year (2017-2018) and resulting from the ‘Transcribe: Participatory Actions in Braga’s Social Housing Estates’ project, created and organised by Space Transcribers and integrated in the ‘(Re)Writing our Neighbourhood’ project, which was promoted by the Braga City Council.

The book is divided into five chapters laid out in the same chronological order as the projects they describe, seeking to combine two relevant components that reflect the work process: a more visual one, reflected in the documentary aspect of the initiatives undertaken in the estates, and in images/maps created and reproduced for new interpretations; and a more theoretical/empirical one, which frames and reflects on the in-situ experiences.